… the more they become the days of old?
It has been 127 days since I made the announcement that I was going out for cigarettes (note, I don’t smoke, read the post). It has been 168 days since Gina joined the team over at the Humane Society of Williamson County.
Given that we both changed jobs within two months of one another, it would be fair to say that our lives have been a little adventurous. Both of us jumping into our new duties with the vigor of twenty-somethings. For Gina this has meant trying to figure out how to be a manager (again). And for me, it has meant learning how to be SOLEY an individual contributor (pretty sure that is the term I heard from HR folks when I was doing interviews).
Gina’s schedule has finally settled down, so that she pretty much always has Thursday and Friday off. This means that her Friday is Wednesday, whereas mine is still, well Friday. The Dogs are happy, seeing as one of us is home more or less all-day, Thursday to Sunday.
I term my transition as “learning how to be SOLEY an individual contributor”, because for the (almost) four years, I have had staff. Having staff for me didn’t mean that I just sat in my office and played video games (though that is something I long to one day experience) or take random naps on a couch in the office, but that I was responsible for managing the output of anywhere from two to six individuals, in addition to whatever my own duties were (which often was a mixed-bag of operational, sales engineering, product management and tech support).
So, now being only responsible for myself (and honestly on some level, only having to answer for myself) has been quite a relief. I have feel like a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders. This is not to say that my workload has decreased by any significant factor, on some level it could be stated that my actual like “typey-typey” workload has increased, but there is a significant deal more job satisfaction and learning that I am doing, so I don’t find it to be stressful, also I make more money now, which to be honest, more money makes things better like 99.9% of the time, right?
However, this post is coming about because, for the last few weekends, I have had a slight feeling of Deja Vu. Not that sort of like, “wow, I think this exact thing has happened before”, more along the lines of, a sort of almost natural fit to my weekend routine has returned.
Back when Gina first moved down, after we got engaged, she was working for Austin Humane Society. I don’t remember the schedule exactly, but I remember that she worked the weekends and that I felt like I had a ton of free-time on my hands, which I promptly used to play video games, namely “Civ”.
This particular aspect of my weekend routine, has returned recently. I haven’t decided if it is a good thing or a bad thing. I could definitely argue that I could be spending my time more productively, but there is something about playing video games, particularly strategy/empire building ones, that I find very centering.
There is a new version of Civilization coming out, CivilizationV. The downside is that the release is currently only for PC, they state that a Mac version will follow, but no statement as to when. I saw this a while back and ignored it, but as the ads have increased, I got the urge to play. I checked out Steam and found that they had CivilizaitonIV and all of the expansion packs for it on sale for $39.99, I got suckered in.
I have to say “CivilizationIV: Colonization” is very interesting, never having played it before, it took me a bit to get used to the play style, it is a little different than the regular Civ, mostly the same, but different enough that the usual Civ tactics don’t pan out. It centers around the American revolution, so all of the units, buildings and winning conditions center around the idea of revolution/independence in the new world.
I think I have gotten my need for Civ, mostly out of my system, but there might be at least one more weekend of attempting to take of the world in me. I have yet to use my ICBMs in the few games I of regular CivilizationIV that I have played this weekend.
As per the topic of this post, as I sit and play Civ, I find myself having almost a nostalgic remembrance of weekends from 2003 and 2004. Which has caused me to think back to how much time I have spent playing games like Civ, Masters of Orion, Capitalism, Industry Giant, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Fallout (all of them), and then thinking about all of the productive things I could have done with that time.
So, I think I might be changing up my weekend routine, you know after this coming weekend, cuz I need to play at least one more multi-hour game of Civ, where I crush all the opponents and win with a Domination Victory.
I do have to say though, that now that I bake bread, making dinner on Sundays seems better than whatever we did for Sunday dinners back then.
I forgot to mention, it is my birthday this week. W00T!
Well back to the grind.